“Well, he was right. I have no longing for the guerrilla life.”
“Guerrilla?” Derek asked.
“Yes, he lived in the jungles with the Communist Party of Kampuchea—the Khmer Rouge. They were on the run, you know, till they took Phnom Penh in 1975. But it must not have been long before he lost his illusions about politics and returned to his true passion—anthropology. He vanished into a remote plateau, cutting himself off even from the Red Khmer, and lost himself among the phnong, the hill tribes. The older cultures interested him more than politics. He lived with one semi-nomadic group for many years, a tribe that called itself the people of the mandala.” Etienne grinned and nodded when he saw Derek’s eyes. “Oh, yes. That is not the Khmer word, but it will do. It is a good word for our purposes.”
Nina smiled. “It evokes such beautiful feelings,” she said. “Among your readers, for instance.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Crowe. I love what you have done with them! They will reach a much wider audience the way you’ve painted them—a wide and unsuspecting audience. And the emotions released when their true nature is understood… the mandalas will feast on that!”
“Go on,” Derek said in irritation. “Your father lived with this tribe for how long?”
“Well, I think he would be there still if his old friends the Khmer Rouge hadn’t tracked him down and hauled him back to Phnom Penh. They called him a traitor to the party. They accused him of training the tribes for a counterrevolutionary offensive, working for Vietnam or the KGB or the CIA. He expected to be forced to confess his part in a conspiracy to overthrow Democratic Kampuchea, but instead he found himself an object of other attention. His body, you see, was covered with sak. These are magic tattoos he had received among the phnong.”
Derek grew rigid, not out of fear that his own secret was about to be revealed but because at last he had a glimpse of the skin’s original owner—and of its origins. This was a story that not even Elias Mooney had seen, with all his talk of astral investigation. He must be triply careful himself to reveal nothing.
Still, he had to say something: “Tattoos?”
“In Cambodia they were very common, especially among soldiers and the tribal people. The sak are like amulets—most often Buddhist symbols of power and protection. The soldiers of Lon Nol, who held Phnom Penh until Pol Pot seized it, had little training or weapons. They relied on talismans. Many were covered head to toe with sak. This didn’t keep the city from falling, of course. My father’s sak were different. They were unique to his tribe—I mean the phnong who took him. And there was one interrogator in Tuol Sleng who took a particular interest in them.
“Chhith was his name. He treated my father very well at first; the interrogations began to resemble anthropological discussions. Chhith asked my father to write down everything he had learned from the phnong, and in return he became his protector in Tuol Sleng. Of course, Chhith’s motives were not what you would call pure. The mandalas spoke to him, through my father, and he believed he could somehow control and use them for his own ends. The three of us understand that the mandalas wish to be spread—but Chhith worked to keep them to himself. A very selfish man, and doomed because of that. He misunderstood them completely; he wished to take their domain for his own.
“After my father’s death, there were a series of murders in Phnom Penh, which was already a skeleton city, a fraction of its original populace working for the Khmer Rouge under rigid strictures, while the rest were out dying in the countryside. At each of the murder sites, one of the mandalas appeared crudely painted in the victim’s blood. Chhith was sacrificing to them, you see? As if they needed his help in that respect! The killing fields were feeding them plenty. And they must have been fat already after the war in Vietnam, the carpet bombing of Cambodia, the Maoist revolution, the Korean war… well, we could go back and back. The twentieth century has been a time of unparalleled feasting, has it not?”
But Derek was thinking of Huon’s story, his concern for his constituents—among them, no doubt, many refugees from the Phnom Penh of those days. “So there are other Cambodians who know about the mandalas? Others who would recognize them in my book or the posters for your club?”
Etienne looked puzzled. “Very few, perhaps. I do not think many. The people in Phnom Penh were kept like prisoners; they wouldn’t have come in contact with Chhith or his sacrifices. And the people of the mandala, the tribe that had kept their secrets for ages, they were wiped out by the same Khmer Rouge who captured my father. It was that act, in fact, which truly set them free.”
“How do you mean?”
Etienne looked down at the notebook he held. “It is hard to be sure exactly—what I have here are fragments of the whole confession. We wanted to be sure of getting the images, that was the main thing. I’ve pieced together the story from the writing that surrounds my father’s drawings—these pieces here and here. I believe he was initiated into the mysteries of the mandalas gradually, over the years he dwelt with the phnong. Now in the tribe were thirty-seven initiates, each devoted to one particular mandala; when one initiate died, a new one must take his place. My father was honored to receive one initiation, and with it one sak—the mark of his own guardian mandala. It was not created with needles and pigments, like other tattoos; it appeared spontaneously at the climax of the ceremony, along with a rush of clairvoyant visions. I suppose you must have had a taste of those yourself, eh?”
Derek chewed the inside of his cheek, still determined to give away nothing until he knew exactly where he stood. He pointed at Nina’s mandala tattoo. “I suppose that was spontaneous too.”
She looked crestfallen, shaking her head. “This is only mimicry, I’m afraid. I have not yet felt their touch, like Etienne.”
“You?”
Etienne grinned slowly and pulled down the collar of his black T-shirt. In the center of his nearly hairless chest, small and sharp as an engraving, was one of the intricate mandala patterns, a sun disk of radiating lines tipped in barbed hooks.
“Were you drunk when you got that?” Derek asked, figuring that his best bet now was to break the mood of rampant occult insanity.
“Drunk? No. A more lasting and enlightening intoxication nourishes me,” Etienne said. “You must have your own sak, Mr. Crowe.”
“I’m not about to bare my ass in public.”
The couple laughed. At least they had a sense of humor.
“Well,” Etienne said, “my father did have them on his ass. And everywhere else. The night the phnong were massacred, while he lay in captivity, the thirty-seven came to him—through him. He had visions then—visions such as we can never conceive. Imagine your own experience, multiplied by thirty-seven. All of them coming through you, into you, at once. It must have been magnificent! He was the last initiate. He had to become their vehicle, their vessel. They did not perhaps trust him to keep his sanity for long, and so they made sure to impress themselves on my father in a way that was… indelible. What a sight he must have been!”
“You never saw him yourself?” Derek asked cautiously.
“I was only a boy, and in France at the time. It was not until later that I tried to trace him. I was denied access to the records of Tuol Sleng, since he was considered an active member of the Khmer Rouge, not one of its innocent victims. Then one day a man found me, a Khmer himself; he told me some of my father’s story, though not all, and questioned me closely. He was looking for my father’s skin, and thought it might have come to me after the fall of the Phnom Penh.”